The present invention generally provides improved surgical and robotic devices, systems, and methods.
Minimally invasive medical techniques are aimed at reducing the amount of extraneous tissue which is damaged during diagnostic or surgical procedures, thereby reducing patient recovery time, discomfort, and deleterious side effects. Millions of surgeries are performed each year in the United States. Many of these surgeries can potentially be performed in a minimally invasive manner. However, only a relatively small number of surgeries currently use these techniques due to limitations in minimally invasive surgical instruments and techniques and the additional surgical training required to master them.
Minimally invasive telesurgical systems for use in surgery are being developed to increase a surgeon's dexterity as well as to allow a surgeon to operate on a patient from a remote location. Telesurgery is a general term for surgical systems where the surgeon uses some form of remote control, e.g., a servomechanism, or the like, to manipulate surgical instrument movements rather than directly holding and moving the instruments by hand. In such a telesurgery system, the surgeon is provided with an image of the surgical site at the remote location. While viewing typically a three-dimensional image of the surgical site on a suitable viewer or display, the surgeon performs the surgical procedures on the patient by manipulating master control input devices, which in turn control the motion of robotic instruments. The robotic surgical instruments can be inserted through small, minimally invasive surgical apertures to treat tissues at surgical sites within the patient, often the trauma associated with accessing for open surgery. These robotic systems can move the working ends of the surgical instruments with sufficient dexterity to perform quite intricate surgical tasks, often by pivoting shafts of the instruments at the minimally invasive aperture, sliding of the shaft axially through the aperture, rotating of the shaft within the aperture, and/or the like.
The servomechanism used for telesurgery will often accept input from two master controllers (one for each of the surgeon's hands) and may include two or more robotic arms or manipulators. Mapping of the hand movements to the image of the robotic instruments displayed by the image capture device can help provide the surgeon with accurate control over the instruments associated with each hand. In many surgical robotic systems, one or more additional robotic manipulators are included for moving an endoscope or other image capture device, additional surgical instruments, or the like.
While the new robotic surgical systems and devices have proven highly effective and advantageous, still further improvements would be desirable. For example, when moving the surgical instruments within a minimally invasive surgical site, robotic surgical manipulators may exhibit a significant amount of movement outside the patient, particularly when pivoting instruments about minimally invasive apertures. As the instruments may independently pivot about their associated apertures at the same time, the robotic manipulators disposed outside the patient may sometimes collide with each other (or with other structures or personnel). Additionally, set-up of the surgical robotic system in preparation for surgery can be challenging, and re-configuring the system to access different tissues of the patient during different phases of a procedure can be inconvenient.
For these and other reasons, it would be advantageous to provide improved devices, systems, and methods for surgery, robotic surgery, and other robotic applications. It would be particularly beneficial if these improved technologies provided a faster and easier set-up, and/or inhibited collisions of the robotic devices during use. Ideally, these improvements would be provided without significantly increasing the size, mechanical complexity, or costs of these systems, and while maintaining or improving their dexterity.